JAKARTA—Anies Baswedan, the brilliant and thoughtful young president of Paramadina University here in this capital city, beams as he describes Indonesia Mengajar (Teach Indonesia). Similar to the Teach For America program in the United States, Baswedan’s initiative sends dedicated young Indonesians to remote regions of this sprawling archipelago to educate their impoverished countrymen.

“It brings enormous value to them,” Baswedan tells me. “We recruit them and then provide seven weeks of teacher training and then army survival training before they are deployed.”

Survival training? Deployed?

Therein lies the dual challenge for Southeast Asia’s largest and fastest-growing economy. Often working without the benefit of roads, running water, electricity, or the Internet, these young volunteer teachers must contend not only with the country’s lagging education system, but also with a creaking infrastructure better suited to the Dutch colony it once was than the G20 member it now is.

For the government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, determined to join the ranks of the world’s truly advanced democracies, the “three Rs” of modernization may as well be reading, writing, and road-building.

Only a third of Indonesian students complete nine full years of basic education. Funding mysteriously goes missing, and rundown school buildings collapse. “There are too many deadwood teachers,” one official tells me, noting that a recent examination to determine teacher salary increases was corrupted.

Not one of Indonesia’s 3,000 private and nearly 100 public universities is in the top 400 globally—yet cheating to gain entrance to them is still widespread. The affluent simply study overseas, with an estimated 32,000 currently taking their talents to countries such as Australia, Malaysia, or the US. Summing up the country’s educational underperformance, the Jakarta Globe recently observed that “Indonesia’s creaking university system is failing to keep pace with its booming economy, struggling to produce graduates equipped for modern working life in the Southeast Asian nation.”

The problems with Indonesia’s human infrastructure are matched by its physical infrastructure. In a far-flung archipelago comprised of 13,500 islands and 750 dialects, Indonesia’s motto, “Unity in Diversity,” requires building bridges, as well as roads, ports, airports, dams, and power plants. Indonesia grew at a remarkably robust 6.4 percent last quarter, faster than any other major emerging market economy except China—making an argument that the lauded and emerging BRIC economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China should become “iBRIC.” Yet as Indonesia’s GDP has grown to become the world’s 16th-largest, spending on infrastructure as a percentage of GDP has actually dropped since 1997, from eight percent to just three percent.

Consequently, companies spend an astonishing 30 percent of their production costs on transportation, meaning that Indonesia’s businesses are stalling against its infrastructure constraints much like the souped-up engines of the late-model BMWs that sit conspicuously on Jakarta’s notoriously gridlocked streets. A Member of Parliament tells me, “We haven’t built a dam in 30 years,” and some of the rapidly proliferating airlines are so shoddy that cell phones can interfere with air-traffic control. The frustration is obvious when Bambang Harymurti, editor of Tempo magazine, tells me, “It costs three times more to send a container from Jakarta to Padang [in other words, from one Indonesian city to another] than it does to send it to Singapore.”

{pagebreak}

It’s this building bottleneck that concerns the 20 percent or so of US companies who have expressed interest in shifting their business from China but cite Indonesia’s “inadequate infrastructure” as a deterrent. Indonesia has investment-grade ratings without investment-grade roads.

Indonesia’s challenges will not be overcome overnight, and the country’s trajectory remains uncertain. Still, there are a number of promising initiatives that will help Indonesia take its place among the world’s fully developed democracies.

First, the Indonesian government must follow through on its recently proposed education master plan, which would sharply reduce secondary-school dropout rates, boost the number of scholarship recipients, and produce 4,000 new Ph.D.s annually.

Second, the US and Indonesia should continue their close collaboration in education, building on George W. Bush’s $150 million or so in aid to bolster learning quality and combat extremism. USAID’s Decentralized Basic Education Program has improved teaching and management for almost half a million students in nearly 1,500 schools across the country, while the Obama Administration has committed $165 million to support educational exchanges through a Higher Education Partnership, in addition to strengthening science and technology ties. A Sesame Street adaptation, Jalan Sesama—which translates to “street for all”—has improved literacy, numeracy, and diversity for 7.5 million young Indonesians.

Third, Indonesia must actually commit to building “streets for all,” beginning with implementing President Yudhoyono’s plan to streamline regulations and increase infrastructure spending by 15 percent next year. Foreign investment will be key, with one American economic attaché informing me that “the opportunities for the US in infrastructure are enormous, but we have no coordination.” As the third-largest investor in Indonesia, the US has already invested nearly $703 million in the first half of 2012, and a recent agreement for American firms to invest $5 billion in manufacturing, transportation, and energy infrastructure over the next two years would go a long way. Coupled with recent World Bank loan guarantees and a new land-acquisition law to facilitate such projects, there are encouraging signs that Indonesia is finally serious about wooing foreign investors.

Five years ago, a young Indonesian entrepreneur told me, “We need to invest in infrastructure and education—but where is the leadership?” As Indonesia faces a crossroads, perhaps it will be one of the passionate young Mengajar teachers, someone who has seen Indonesia’s diversity and difficulties, who will show the country how to build the roads to its bright future.

That the leader of secular, democratic Turkey—a longtime US ally and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—has managed to out-Putin Putin when it comes to steamrolling civil liberties the past ten years is just the beginning of the way politics is changing on the Black Sea. Even while Putin receives a fresh round of global scorn for the two-year prison sentence meted out to three young women of the “Pussy Riot” punk band, Erdogan has successfully executed every trick in the Putin playbook except one. But it is that one failure that may have the most dramatic effect on Turkey’s future and the direction of US foreign policy.

“Turkey now has problems with all of its neighbors, including Russia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, and Armenia.”

For two neighbors that fought eight wars between them from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century, Russia and Turkey have a lot in common. Both bridge Asia and Europe. Both enjoyed historic runs as world powers. Both have declared their intention to join Europe. And under Putin and Erdogan, both have taken historic steps away from democracy in an attempt to recapture past glory. Call it the four steps toward autocracy in a global age.

Step 1: Use the judicial system to crush your enemies.

Like Putin—whom The Economist recently argued is “building the legal framework for authoritarian rule”—Erdogan has used the courts to create what has been called “a new climate of fear in Istanbul.” While arresting students, journalists, and activists in record numbers, he has trained his greatest guns on the military—which has defended Turkey’s secularism since 1921, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created modern Turkey out of the Ottoman Empire’s ashes. As one Turk recently said of the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator, the military is “the reason Turkey never had an Assad.” With hundreds of officers now behind bars on trumped-up charges that they planned a coup, last month Erdogan forcibly retired 40 top admirals and generals currently on trial before their guilt or innocence could be established. But like Putin, Erdogan is granted a lot of slack by his own citizens—he took a moribund economy in 2003 and turned it into one of Europe’s strongest. Culturally, cities such as Istanbul are thriving. Many Turks believe life is better under Erdogan and don’t look fondly on the three coups the military staged since 1960 or the government it forced to quit in 1997.

Step 2: Mask your true ideology under the guise of democracy.

Just as Putin speaks of democracy in Russia while making no attempt to hide his affection for the centrally planned, KGB-dominated days of the Soviet Union, Erdogan has praised democracy while expressing disgust at Turkey’s separation of mosque and state, calling himself both “the imam of Istanbul” and “a servant of sharia.” Since taking power in 2003, Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party has tripled the number of students attending Islamist high schools; passed a new law requiring that every public facility in the country have a Muslim prayer room; taken control of the historically secular Turkish Academy of Sciences; and built more mosques than any previous government while announcing plans to create a super-mosque in Istanbul with the “highest minarets in the world.” It’s little wonder that in 2010, Saudi King Abdullah presented Erdogan with Saudi Arabia’s most prestigious prize for his “services to Islam.”

{pagebreak}

Step 3: Make friends with old adversaries at the expense of old allies.

Just as Putin actively built friendships with his old foes Germany, Italy, and France during his first term, Erdogan took office announcing a strategic realignment of Turkish policy centered on “zero problems” with the neighbors. He sought out new partnerships with Iran, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and Hamas—and did so at the expense of the US and Israel. In 2003, he won Arab plaudits for rejecting American requests to use Turkish territory to transport troops to Iraq. In 2009, he was hailed as a Muslim hero for picking a fight with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Further raising Western eyebrows, he sided with Iran against the US over Tehran sanctions; championed Palestinian statehood at the United Nations; lauded Pakistani soldiers accidentally killed by US drones as “our martyrs”; and even accepted a human rights award from former Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi.

Step 4: Assert strength by walking softly and carrying a big stick.

If there is one lesson of Putin’s that Erdogan hasn’t learned, it is that tough talk needs to be followed by decisive action. The only battles Erdogan seems capable of fighting thus far are wars of words—making him look, as journalist Gideon Rachman puts it, “naïve and ineffective.”

He pledged to bring Hamas and Fatah together but failed. He pledged to keep NATO out of Libya but failed. When Israel killed nine pro-Palestinian Turkish activists on an aid ship bound for Gaza in 2010, he threatened to send the Turkish navy to protect future flotillas—then didn’t follow through. When Cyprus began developing oil fields off its coast in 2010, Erdogan threatened to send Turkish warships—then didn’t follow through. When Syria reportedly shot down a Turkish reconnaissance jet this past June, Erdogan promised that Damascus would feel Turkey’s wrath—and then didn’t follow through. It has led some to wonder if Erdogan’s bark is worse than his bite.

Syria may prove to be Erdogan’s undoing. Turkey first supported Syria, then tried to coax it to change, then criticized it, and then officially allied with the Syrian opposition. It has put Turkey in the uncomfortable position of being the only country that has allowed its soil to become the base of Syrian opposition as well as the sole NATO country trying to persuade other NATO members to intervene. Other Muslims are openly accusing Turkey of being part of a “sabotage axis” against Damascus, aligning with what nations such as Iran regard as “the devil’s instrument on earth”—America—to unseat an Islamic regime.

Far from “zero problems with its neighbors,” Turkey now has problems with all of its neighbors, including Russia, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, and Armenia. It has led the Turkish magazine Radikal to observe that Turkey, which was once known as the sick man of Europe, is now becoming “the lonely man of the Middle East.” With no NATO allies coming to the rescue anytime soon, Turkey runs that risk that its own Kurds—which it has been battling for three decades—will ally with Kurds in Syria to destabilize Turkey’s southern border. As the Centre for Research on Globalization puts it, “Should Syria burn, Turkey will ultimately burn too.”

Once again, Erdogan is turning back to the Putin playbook. Term-limited out as prime minister, he is working to rewrite the Constitution to give the president more power, an office for which he will then run Putin-style in 2014. It was said that Syria is the place where Ataturk, as a young military officer, first proved his greatest strengths. A century later, it is revealing a Turkish prime minister’s greatest weaknesses. Where it will lead—for Turkey and America—nobody knows. But we’ll soon find out how much of Putin that Erdogan really has in him.

The author is Founding Chairman of Business Executives for National Security, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington, DC. This is a personal comment.